urls

Make Post Titles Less Spammy Looking

Keyword Stuffing Is Bad

Stephan Spencer has written a brief article highlighted by an interview he conducted with the infamous Matt Cutts. The article discusses why it’s a bad idea to have a ton of keywords as part of your URL permalink. In WordPress, depending upon how your permalink options are setup, whatever words are placed into the post title, are the same words that will appear within the permalink, unless you manually configured the post slug.

When Stephan asked Matt what is excessive in the length of a keyword-rich URL?, Matt responded with:

If you can make your title four- or five-words long – and it is pretty natural. If you have got a three, four or five words in your URL, that can be perfectly normal. As it gets a little longer, then it starts to look a little worse. Now, our algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.

The thing to be aware of is, ask yourself: “How does this look to a regular user?” – because if, at any time, somebody comes to your page or, maybe, a competitor does a search and finds 15 words all strung together like variants of the same word, then that does look like spam, and they often will send a spam report. Then somebody will go and check that out.

So, I would not make it a big habit of having tons and tons of words stuffed in there, because there are plenty of places on a page, where you can have relevant words and have them be helpful to users – and not have it come across as keyword stuffing.

While Stephan goes on to offer some tips on keyword permalink management, I have a tip of my own. When you are writing a blog post or an article, come up with 3-7 keywords at a maximum that are relevant, and give the reader a good idea as to what the article will be about. Once again, we come up against the word of Relevancy, and you don’t need 500 keywords in your permalink URL to be relevant.

I’ve seemed to have had success with my permalink setup. In case you were curious, this is how I have mine configured:

Custom: /%postname%/

URLAO Another Pretty URL Shortener

UrlLao Logo

I know what you’re thinking. We have enough URL shortener’s already, right? Despite that fact, URLAO has come along looking to introduce some new features into the mix. urlao pronounced (“earlao“), is a project that was created by pooliestudios.

Under The Hood:

urlao works like any other url shortener service. They give you a box to place your ugly URL in, and out comes a beautiful looking url. However, there are some useful features hidden underneath the ADVANCED link.

Advanced Link For More Options

In this example, I used the following ugly URL;

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=en&saddr=Cupertino,+Santa+Clara, +California,+United+States&daddr=new+york,+ny&sll=37.0625,-95.677071&sspn= 52.152749,73.300781&ie=UTF8&cd=1&ll=39.571822,-98.085937&spn=50.61825, 73.300781&z=4&om=1

Without using any of the advanced features, URLAO spits out http://urlao.com/5sqm6 which if you ask me, is pretty, but far from what I’d like to see. Now let’s dig into the advanced features using the same URL I provided above.

The advanced options give you the ability to customize the URL output, password protect the redirect, cloaking the URL which only shows the shortened URL text within the address bar of a user’s browser and finally, a url preview function. When someone clicks on your shortened link, the user will be shown the redirect and will be asked to click a link to confirm their destination.

Advanced Options Area

In my opinion, for a preview feature, why couldn’t it be automatic by simply copying the Title text of the webpage being linked to into the “ALT” attribute for the shortened link. This would allow me to hover over a shortened link with my mouse cursor and at a glance, preview the destination. Seems pretty simple to me yet, none of the URL shortening services that I know of do it.

Becoming A Verified Owner:

Once you create and save your shortened URL, you become a verified owner for that link. This means you can log into URLAO to check on the total amount of hits for a specific URL, or you can change any of the settings for that URL in case you change your mind or the URL that you linked to has changed.

Conclusion:

I like how URLAO has added in features that I haven’t seen in TinyURL or URLtea. If these guys could implement my idea of making the links automatically descriptive via the “ALT” attribute within a link so that all anyone has to do to preview a link is to hover over it, then you’ve got yourself a URL Shortener service that is damn worthy of using. All of the other bells and whistles of URLAO make it a viable alternative to URLTea and TinyURL.

If you happen to use the service, be sure to chime in your thoughts below.